Chat Apps Will Kill SMS Messaging…Eventually, Says Study

By Sherri L. Smith, Senior Staff Writer | Apr 29, 2013 11:40 AM EST

SMS is so 5 minutes ago. According to a recent report, telcom operator’s cash cow has been overtaken by free messaging apps such as Kik, Viber and WhatsApp in terms of message volume. This report conducted by Informa, shows that increasing amounts of users are relying on third-party apps such as those above or company-branded apps such as BBM and Samsung’s ChatOn to send text messages.

The report, commissioned by the Financial Times, states that approximately 19 billion messages were sent a day in 2012 compared to 17.6 billion SMS texts. Projections of messages sent via third-party apps are expected to balloon to 41 billion in 2013. And the year after that, texts sent by messaging apps should rise to 50 billion.

SMS may not be dead yet, however. Text messages sent via SMS will also experience growth in the coming couple of years, jumping to 21 billion. And while the volume of messages via apps have increased, actual user numbers are lower than SMS users. In 2012, SMS had 3.5 billion users compared to 586.3 million messaging app users. However the report excludes major messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger.